You’re hiking streamside through a rhododendron tangle when you hear a short, musical trill – it kind of mimics the riffles in the stream. I know, you’re in a hurry – got a lot of hiking to do. But if you have a minute to track this little chorister down you won’t be disappointed. What you’re hearing is a Canada warbler.

I spend six weeks every spring doing bird surveys for the Forest Service across Western North Carolina. My travels take me from Hiwassee Dam, to Lake Chatuge, to Black Balsam, to Hot Springs, to the Pinks Beds, to Roan Mountain, Mount Mitchell, Roaring Creek and Boone Fork plus other locations.

I was having my morning coffee on the small floating dock in the narrow, clear Weeki Wachee River about three miles upstream of the Gulf of Mexico and watching for manatees. The girls and I had discovered that early morning was a good time to catch these unique creatures headed in or out of the river. The loud, incessant calling of a red-shouldered hawk from the woods across the river suddenly shattered the morning quiet.

Due to contractual obligations with the Forest Service I have been in the woods a little earlier than usual this year. I’m not complaining, it’s been wonderful watching spring arrive. I began hitting the woods in February and everything, except the conifers and other evergreens, was brown and/or gray. There was a little bird life — chickadees, titmice, juncos, woodpeckers and other winter residents — but not a lot, a few chips and call notes but only an occasional chickadee song.

Waterfowl have been scarce across Western North Carolina this fall and winter. Traditional haunts like Lake Julian in Asheville, Lake James near Marion and our own waterfowl magnet Lake Junaluska have been mostly vacant this season. Even coot numbers are really low this year.

The monarch butterfly is known for its amazing annual spring and fall migration — from wintering grounds in Mexico in the spring northward across North America then reversing in fall and returning to Mexico, a trip of more than 2,000 miles (one way) for many of these hardy bugs. This migration is a biological mystery.

One of the greatest shows on Earth is about to take center stage. Spring ephemerals will begin clawing through the gray-brown leaf litter within the month. Some of the earliest wildflowers to open will include spring beauty, various violets, hairy buttercup, hepatica, trailing arbutus, bloodroot and trout lily.

It’s been awhile since The Naturalist’s Corner’s chief investigative journalist, Kuteeng Satire, has been called upon to help us clarify any natural history phenomenon that might be accessible to most of our fellow travelers here on Spaceship Earth.

Remember the scene in “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid,” where the Kid was asked by an old miner (I think Butch and the Kid were applying for positions as payroll guards) if he could shoot, and tosses a small object on the ground 20 or 30 feet in front of them? Kid holstered his sidearm and prepared to draw and the old miner stopped him, saying something like no, no, no, I just want to know if you can hit anything with that.

They say great minds think alike, and who am I to argue with “They?” The Franklin Bird Club and Carolina Field Birders (CFB) each schedule their annual CBC (Christmas Bird Count) for the last available weekend in Audubon’s count window. They do so for the same reason — both counts are relative newcomers to North Carolina’s organized CBCs and both groups have participants already committed to longer-running CBCs in the area.

I think Lewis Carroll could have just as easily warned of the Timberdoodle as the Jubjub bird in the “Jabberwocky,” both could appear to be nonsensical avian entities. The timberdoodle, a.k.a. American woodcock, appears to be constructed from incongruous leftover avian parts.

Flying around Facebook pages (after all this is the age of information) is, apparently, a poll or online survey declaring that Macon County doesn’t want anymore wilderness. According to this online scientific survey, Macon County is adamantly opposed to adding anymore wilderness to the national forest in Macon County. The graphic I saw had 60 percent of respondents saying “… leave Macon County as is .…”

There’s nothing I like better than mixing pleasure with pleasure. 

Last weekend, I got to spend three wonderful nights in a 12-by-24-foot cabin on the banks of the Ouachita River in northeast Louisiana near where I grew up. The cabin is a joint venture between one dear old friend I reconnected with a few years back and one dear new friend that I met a few years back.

"It’s like déjà vu all over again." —Yogi Berra (RIP)

Maybe some of you who, like me, are getting longer in the tooth are guilty of letting our guard down, of thinking old battles had been won and that today’s and tomorrow’s environmental (social too, but that’s a different column) issues had become arguments of degree not kind. But a quick look around shows that’s not the case.

According to Steve Ford, in a piece for NC Policy Watch called “Policies, power, pride divide the NC House and Senate” (7/13/2015), the state’s current Republican senators were a bit disappointed that some of their regulatory “reforms” were causing controversy and being stalled due to environmental concerns.

The deluge we slogged through a couple of weeks ago certainly didn’t help this fall’s color palette. But not to worry, there’s still plenty to see. I made a short trip up the Blue Ridge Parkway from U.S. 23/74 to Richland Balsam to see what was happening — and it’s happening. Looks to me like this weekend will likely be peak for elevations between 3,500 feet and 4,500 feet. There is already a lot of steel grey above that, but it’s the middle of October.

OK, OK, you can bring the kids back into the room, we’re not talking that kinda horny here. The hickory horned devil is the largest caterpillar in North America. It is the larval stage of the regal moth, Citheronia regalis, and in its last instar or molt before pupating it can grow to between five and six inches long. That is five to six inches long and 3/8-inch in diameter of mean, green dangerous caterpillar-looking machine.

All the lunar-phobes out there, as well as many of the astronomically challenged – like me, will be praying for clear skies for the night and pre dawn hours on Sept. 27-28. The total eclipse of September’s Harvest Moon (so called in the Northern Hemisphere because it is the full moon closest to the autumnal equinox) will bring an end to this latest — gasp — lunar tetrad.

I am not nearly so frustrated with my black oil sunflower seed-addicted bruin neighbor as I was after his little escapade last Friday morning around 2 a.m. I was trying to finish some writing before I left for my pre-dawn “day job” when I heard some noise on the deck. I had chased a raccoon away the night before and figured it was back. But the noise had a little more substance to it. Bear, I thought.

perseids falling
perseids burning white hot
perseids flame out

I made sure to keep an eye out for falling stars last week on my pre-dawn delivery route since it was during the peak of the annual Perseids meteor shower. One morning was pretty socked in with clouds and/or fog but most of the rest of the week was pretty good.

Due to the generosity of great friends Bill and Elaine Cave of Asheville, my family has enjoyed a summer respite on Isle of Palms in South Carolina for a decade or so. We made it down around 5 p.m. on Sunday (8/2) — still enough time for the girls to hit the beach for a while.

My family and I made a quick run up to Waterrock Knob on the Blue Ridge Parkway around dusk last Sunday (July 19) to get a peek at some celestial luminaries. Venus and Jupiter joined the waxing crescent moon on the western horizon. They danced and played hide and seek amidst layered clouds whose purple backs touched the night while their bellies bathed in the last yellow and orange rays of the sun falling over the western horizon. It was a beautiful, tranquil setting.

Well, it wasn’t really a voice — it was an email. I received an email from Bruce Lampright back in November 2014.

I occasionally see The Smoky Mountain News’ Garret K. Woodward’s Facebook posts about hitting the trails around WNC for a mind-clearing run and my knees twinge with the memories of similar sorties and the sad recognition that without surgery those days are lost. 

The other day, while chasing birdies for the Forest Service, I encountered a pretty wildflower along an abandoned logging road. The plant was small purple-fringed orchid, Platanthera psycodes. It was unusual in that the flowers were white rather than the normal lavender to reddish-purple one generally encounters.

Neotropical migrants can be flashy things — think scarlet tanager, Baltimore oriole, rose-breasted grosbeak or those tiny butterflies of the bird world like American redstart, blackburnian warbler, hooded warbler and northern parula, just to name a few. And often when we strike out in search of these colorful creatures we go to places like the Blue Ridge Parkway, where it is open and there is good light so we can see the amazing color. But sometimes beige is cool.

What better way to spring into the season than chasing migrants across Western North Carolina? I was with the Franklin Bird Club at Kituwah on April 27 and we had beautiful weather and good birding. I had teased that trip by noting that Kituwah is one of the most reliable places I know of for finding bobolinks in migration.

Cumberland Island, which is composed of Great Cumberland Island (the national seashore) and Little Cumberland Island (private), is one of the largest barrier islands along Georgia’s coast. Cumberland Island is about 18 miles long and about 3 miles wide — around 40 square miles. The eastern edge of the island is bordered by the Atlantic Ocean, while the west, north and south are bounded by sounds, rivers and marsh.

Yay! Spring break! That special time to be sequestered with adolescents and/or pre-adolescents in about 50 square feet while hurtling down the highway at 70 m.p.h.

I was commiserating with a friend who works for the Forest Service just after it was announced that they were taking a step back from the plan revision process to schedule another round of public meetings. 

The FS rolled out a “draft” management plan last fall after a series of public meetings. The plan, while clearly labeled “draft”, placed around 700,000 acres of the million or so acres of the Nantahala and Pisgah national forests in management areas deemed appropriate for logging. To say the plan caught some stakeholders off guard is like saying the Grand Canyon is a ravine in Arizona.

There is one winter visitor to our North Carolina Mountains that is probably happy the Blue Ridge Parkway is closed and is not burgeoning with sightseers and thrill-seekers like it is the rest of the year. That visitor would be Aquila chrysaetos canadensis, the North American golden eagle. There is certainly a mystique about this bird, North America’s largest raptor. It is fairly common out West and is thought of as a bird of wide-open areas. But there is a small – 3,000 to 5,000 – population of golden eagles that breed in northeastern Quebec and migrate throughout the Appalachians. This bird, from preliminary research, appears to be a forest dweller that eschews human contact.

I had originally intended to spend today (Monday, Feb. 16) doing a couple of short surveys for the annual Great Backyard Bird Count. But Sunday morning amid more and more (and more and more dire) weather forecasts warning of some pretty heavy winter weather coming our way I began to contemplate counting Sunday instead. Around 9 a.m. Sunday I peeked out the downstairs window. Well, in my yard were 17 wild turkeys. It looked like a large group of jakes and gobblers.

The Haywood County Board of Commissioners decided that today (Feb. 2) was the day they would boldly venture into the world of Forest Plan Revision. They did this by unanimously passing a “non-binding” resolution, which had been publicly vetted — oh, wait there was no public comment unless you count the informal poll among board members where they asked each other if they had been approached by citizens regarding the Forest Service (FS) plan revision. This resolution, titled “Resolution in Opposition to Pisgah National Forest Land Management Plan Revision” miraculously manages to simultaneously oppose and support almost every stakeholder issue surrounding the current, federally mandated Nantahala/Pisgah Plan Revision process currently underway.

The best way I know of to get a rare bird to fly the coop is to write about it. So by the time you see this article the two drake common goldeneyes that have been hanging out at Lake Junaluska for the past week or so will likely have vanished. But they have been consistently sighted along the shoreline on the “cross-side” of the lake a couple of hundred yards from the dam.

I had the pleasure of participating in two Christmas Bird Counts (CBCs) this past weekend. The first was the Balsam CBC on Friday Jan. 2. This was our 13th count — 12th official — and we had 18 participants. Our unofficial tally for this year’s count was a little on the low side: we recorded 68 species and I believe average is (or was, before this year) 73.

It seems like the golden-winged warbler (GWWA) has become the non-game poster bird for everything from clearcuts to shelterwood cuts to overstory removal to seed tree harvests in our national forests. The philosophy appears to be “if you build it they will come,” see —www.srs.fs.usda.gov/compass/2014/07/03/young-forests-can-benefit-wildlife/. 

Yogi Berra said it best — “It’s like déjà vu all over again.” When I read Holly Kays’ Nov. 12 article about the USDA Forest Service’s Plan Revision in The Smoky Mountain News (www.smokymountainnews.com/news/item/14637), I was taken back to the early 2000s, when I was a fulltime reporter at SMN covering meetings regarding President Clinton’s Roadless Initiative. People, groups and/or organizations had staked out positions either in opposition to or in support of the initiative and were pretty intractable.

I was fortunate to be able to spend a few hours last Saturday morning (Nov. 23) with members of the Carolina Field Birders on one of their trips around Lake Junaluska. It was still a bit chilly around 9 a.m. when we were to meet at the swimming pool area. But the wind wasn’t blowing and the sun had a nice warm feeling to it. Plus we could see a few interesting birds from our vantage point. Nothing warms birders up in the wintertime like seeing birds.

The full Hunter’s Moon is waning and the night sky will be revealing more of her secrets till we spin around and catch December’s Long Night Moon. Around the world it’s getting harder and harder to see those dark sky secrets because of the pernicious and seemingly ever-growing light pollution. 

This region has been furnishing the eastern United States with quantities of various evergreen materials (trees, running ground cedar, mistletoe, galax, and so on) for well over a century. Of these, one of the most interesting is American holly. In many ways, the plant’s dark green leaves and scarlet berries signify the season almost as much as the Christmas tree itself.

Monarch butterflies, like orange autumn leaves filling the skies, have been winging it to Mexico for the last month or so. Peak migration for the mountains of Western North Carolina is from mid- to late September through early to mid-October. 

Color is starting to spill down the mountainsides once again. I recently received an email from a reader asking about the different fall colors and directions for some good viewing so I thought I would pull that information together from some past columns for a little refresher.